Wow, what's going on at Intel? It seems like the company has decided to delay its entire consumer desktop roadmap, as we've now heard from a very reliable source that Intel has pushed back the Sandy Bridge-E launch from Q4 this year to January 2012.

We have a feeling that Intel is doing an AMD and what we mean by that is that Intel is focusing on its server CPU business instead of on consumers. AMD delayed its consumer Bulldozer launch in favour of its Opteron CPUs and it's possible that this is part of what made Intel change its strategy. The Sandy Bridge-E CPUs are based on the same core as Intel's upcoming LGA-2011 and LGA-1356 Xeon processors and these are big chips which mean fewer chips per wafer. As such it's entirely plausible that Intel is trying to stock up on chips for its Xeon platforms, but this is only speculation from our side at this point in time.

As the Sandy Bridge-E CPUs are set to replace Intel's aging LGA-1366 Core i platform it looks like the enthusiast end of the market is going to have to wait another quarter before they can get their hands on the new platform. This is going to disappoint quite a few people out there, but this is still a very tiny market for Intel and it's unlikely that it will affect Intel's profits much, if at all. Hopefully there won't be any further delays, although it's also entirely possible that this is a calculated move by Intel, as the company launched a new LGA-1366 CPU only this week, but it's believed to be the last of a dying breed.